Shocker chair great for execution-related festivities, amusements

Bring cruel and unusual to the party with the Shocker Chair: all the hilarity of capital punishment, none of the cleanup. Note the coin slot and cash receptacle – talk about affordable justice! From the product page:

Experience the gruesome Shocker electric chair with 2,000 volts involved. It’s guaranteed to make you tingle. Let your friends see the smoke rise as the voltage is increased.

Risk Assessment
Little or no risk.

Brighton, England, used to have a wonderful old-style arcade museum packed with pre-1970s vintage amusement machines; one of them was very much in this vein.

Until the early 1908s, Disney World used to have a shocker machine in their Main Street Penny Arcade. It was a tall wooden console with a light-up meter and two brass doorknobs. You grabbed the knobs and held on as long as you could stand the current. As a kid, I thought it was amazingly cool and dangerous and I was sad to see it go (long before the Arcade itself was gift-shopped).

This was an arcade machine – I’ve seen them in several arcades around England and Europe. I had a go on one in Spain — you do indeed have to hold onto the electrodes as long as possible. And it did have a smoke machine built into the top.

It was, I think, one of the most expensive machines in the arcade, and was inevitably at the front (out on the street) for maximum spectacle.

I’ve seen this at several Dave and Buster’s in the US. As I understood it, the “electrodes” are just glorified, suped up vibrators. Not the kind to operate at any sort of nice, pleasurable frequency, but really really high frequency, moving a very short distance, thus producing an unpleasant tingle in your palms not at all unlike an electric shock. Hence, though I wouldn’t be surprised if “1,000 volts” were involved, no actual electricity touching the “rider” (well, maybe a token amount, like you get from a 9 volt battery? Don’t know) means no real risk.

At least, that’s how I always interpreted how it works. Please, correct me if I’m wrong.